D&D General What DM-skills are you bad at?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

My second weakness was and still is, a tendency to over prepare. I could prepare a whole campaign for level 1 to 20 only to see the group die at level 10... Now I still over prepare, but it is a lot less. I try to keep ahead for 2 to 5 levels only...

I over-plan, but don't "over-prepare", if that makes any sense. Basically, I lay out the whole main plot for a campaign all the way to level 20+, with world-shaking consequences and awesome stories to tell . . . but then only make it through enough sessions to get to around level 5. I have multiple examples of doing this, and it's just really disappointing. (And the stupid pandemic contributed a lot to this.)

As for preparing for individual sessions, yeah, I basically don't do that. I get a rough idea of how I want the session to go, but assume that my players are going to do something off-the-rails, and just wing it most of the time. Improv is my main tool in-game. It makes it so I'm never caught off-guard by something my players do, ruining a very neatly-prepared session and wasting a lot of time on my part.

 

[Helldritch]

I over-plan, but don't "over-prepare", if that makes any sense. Basically, I lay out the whole main plot for a campaign all the way to level 20+, with world-shaking consequences and awesome stories to tell . . . but then only make it through enough sessions to get to around level 5. I have multiple examples of doing this, and it's just really disappointing. (And the stupid pandemic contributed a lot to this.)

As for preparing for individual sessions, yeah, I basically don't do that. I get a rough idea of how I want the session to go, but assume that my players are going to do something off-the-rails, and just wing it most of the time. Improv is my main tool in-game. It makes it so I'm never caught off-guard by something my players do, ruining a very neatly-prepared session and wasting a lot of time on my part.

For third edition, I did three campaign that rose to 20th level. All adventures were done, fully mapped and detailed. And I really mean fully created. Only got to 20th level. The other three never rose higher than level 12 and 8th. That means that 5 "modules" were never played as they were intended in the second campaign and 10 in the third one. I do reuse stuff, but modifying an adventure meant as a follow-up is often almost as much work as creating a new one. That is what I call over preparing.

But preparing a session is not a bad thing at all. I do that for every single session.